January 24, 2007

Crank (2006): C+

Racist, xenophobic, homophobic and sexist – Crank has some intolerance for everyone. Hurtling forward like a nihilistic PCP addict on a bender, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s action film about a hitman poisoned with a drug that’ll cause him to die if his heart rate drops too low – in other words, it’s Cardiac Speed – revels in its anti-P.C. indecency. While its brazen, indiscriminate offensiveness is in tune with its crazed Loony Tunes action (and accompanying tongue-in-cheek humor), its freneticism quickly becomes exhausting, futilely trying to cover up the ludicrousness of every decision made by its dim characters. Awakening to find himself pumped full of a “Beijing Cocktail” that can only be counteracted by keeping his adrenaline levels sky high, assassin Chev Chelios (a suitably goofy-badass Jason Statham) goes on an L.A. rampage to find the adversary (Jose Pablo Cantillo) who sentenced him to this chemical-induced death. Maligning blacks, gays, Arabs and a girlfriend (Amy Smart) whom he screws on a Chinatown street as passersby stare in astonishment, Chev repeatedly proves himself a sadistic psycho without much in the way of grey matter. Fittingly, then, Neveldine and Taylor’s aesthetic ably matches their protagonist’s empty-headed smash-and-grab demeanor, jazzing up Chev’s ultra-violent encounters with flashy cinematographic gimmicks that – except for a few sweet-looking phone conversations where the person Chev’s talking to is seen in picture-in-picture squares projected onto flat surfaces – are simply so much superfluous, distracting visual noise.